Ode to a Lecture – Or, Teaching Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches

Last week, I was forced to admit something: My students want me to lecture. They like it when I stand up and tell them things while they sit back and listen.

That feels sacrilegious to say, but it also feels true.
​For the past nine weeks, my colleague and I have been trying to craft an active, student-centered, place-based learning experience for our high school learners. Learners who, for one reason or another, have not passed social studies and are therefore in danger of not graduating. We know that virtual schooling during the pandemic was hard for many of them, but we also know that the problems with social studies in most high schools stretch much farther back than March 2019.

In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me (first published in 1995), sociologist James Loewen systematically showed the public how the standard history curriculum is often only loosely connected to historical fact. While his content analysis of textbooks was groundbreaking, the argument itself was not: people of color have been questioning the truth of history curriculum and the role it plays in maintaining white supremacy for far longer. For example, Carter G. Woodson wrote The Miseducation of the Negro in 1933. In it, he argued that the lies of omission in schooling paint Africans and African Americans as “human being[s] of the lower order, unable to subject passion to reason, and therefore useful only when made the hewer of wood and the drawer of water for others” (p. 34). These dehumanizing lies served as the “perfect device” for controlling and subjugating African Americans. Similarly, in his 1963 “Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin argued that the “bad faith,” “cruelty,” “brainwashing,” and “mythology” perpetuated by schools was nothing short of a “criminal conspiracy to destroy [the Black child]” (para. 19).

What Baldwin, Woodson, Loewen and so many others have been saying is that the myth-making that passes for history in America’s classrooms too often serves not as an introduction to the historical record nor as an invitation to inquire about our social world but rather as an elaborate justification of the racialized and racist social structure we live in.

No wonder, the group of mostly Brown and Black girls we teach on Wednesdays is failing social studies.

Now, I’m not saying anything about the specific teachers that my Wednesday students have encountered at their high school. I don’t know what happens in their classrooms. I’ve never spent any time in these classrooms. But I am saying that within our system of schooling in the United States, the social studies have served as one of the primary vehicles for passing on dominant narratives about the United States, narratives that likely run in direct opposition to what my Wednesday students’ lived experiences tell them.

Added on top of this curricular problem is the instructional problem we find in a lot of high school social studies classrooms: the ‘sage on the stage,’ where the teacher knows everything and students are passive receptacles waiting to be filled with names and dates to be regurgitated later on a test. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called this the “banking” method of education, and he argued in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed that it is a fundamentally dehumanizing process:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power…serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed (p. 73).

Again, I’m not saying that the teachers in my Wednesday students’ school engage in banking. I have no way of knowing that. But I do know that our current testing regime in the US is built upon this idea of students as empty vessels waiting for instructional communiqués, which they are expected to spit back out onto endless high-stakes tests.

In listening to these critiques of both curriculum and instruction—critiques that are especially common in the social studies—it becomes understandable why the students in our Explore MKE course may have checked out of past versions of social studies. This is why my co-teacher and I are so determined not to recreate those conditions during our weekly two hours with the students. We are trying to create a learning space that invites our students into historical and social inquiry, that incites curiosity, and that helps the students see themselves in history and the social sciences.

Which is why my students’ rapt attention to my lecture last week felt so wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I wasn’t interesting. (I was definitely interesting.) I’m just wondering why a moment of instruction that felt a little too much like what we’re trying not to do held their attention for far longer than the student-driven inquiry we had tried to facilitate for the hour before.

See, for the hour before my lecture on Milwaukee’s civil rights history, Candance and I had struggled to fully engage our students. We had prodded and brainstormed, coaxed and questioned, trying to get our students to identify something (anything!) in Milwaukee they wanted to learn more about and that could guide their final ‘project’—in quotes because all that project entails is putting a single pin on an interactive map of Milwaukee with some kind of explanation. While a handful of students ran with the task, most did not. “I don’t know anything about Milwaukee,” Tanya said. “There’s nothing interesting in this city,” Mayte said. “What about Jeffrey Dahmer?” Ana said. So Candance and I slowly moved around the room, working one-on-one with students in order to help them think through their lives in Milwaukee and the things that held their curiosity. Meanwhile, all those other students not deep in conversation with us were… FaceTiming friends at the grocery store. Playing CandyCrush. Folding origami. Teasing one another about their crushes. Napping.

Eventually, we made our way to every student, and eventually, every student found something that piqued their interest, but it felt like a slog to get there. And it took a lot of self-control from me and Candance not to police and manage how the students spent their time. After all, that’s not why we are here. Ultimately, we agreed that the “off-task” behaviors ended up providing a cognitive break for students, which in turn provided a generative space for them to sit with the task at hand. But wow—getting to that point was hard. We thought that giving students power over what we researched and experienced in our remaining time together would be inherently engaging, but it wasn’t. It was a task met with reluctance and, if we’re being honest, resistance.

That’s why when it was time to move onto the “schoolish” part of our session—where we would learn about Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches—I was nervous. I had spent hours over the past few days trying to figure out how to provide this historical content in a meaningful and relevant way, but in the end I wound up with my version of a lecture. Not a standing-at-a-podium-and-droning-on-monotonously kind of lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. It would be interactive and feature imperfectly drawn maps and timelines and strategically placed audio clips, but it was still, essentially, a lecture.

But here’s the rub: They loved it. They were so engaged—more engaged, it seemed than during the past hour and a half of student-driven inquiry. And in the moment, I was reminded of what my pre-service teachers (my undergrad students) tell me every semester. They tell me that they can’t get their students to do inquiry or active learning or creative projects. They tell me that their students are so much better behaved and engaged when they stick to a traditional instructional script. They tell me their students ‘can’t handle’ inquiry. They tell me their students whine when they are asked to think. They tell me it’s just so much easier to give a lecture and assign some questions. As I looked out at 25 young women, eyes glued to me and my messy map of Milwaukee, I worried that maybe my undergrads were right and that maybe I have been wrong all these years about what good instruction looks like.

But in that moment, I told myself what I tell my undergraduate students when they recount their failed interactive lessons or the chaos that ensued when high school students were asked to engage in independent research. I reminded myself that thinking is hard. It’s much harder than what schools typically ask students to do. Consuming information and spitting it back out is so much easier than designing and conducting an inquiry; it’s so much easier than navigating the peer relationships of cooperative learning or the physical demands of experiential learning. What’s more, schools give students very few opportunities to practice these harder skills because they are too busy prepping students for standardized tests. Of course, our K12 students prefer the easier path, but with practice and persistence, they will come to love the vibrancy of real intellectual work more.

All of this is true. But I realized in that moment that something else important is going on, too.

---

Learning involves gathering information—encountering it, processing it, making meaning out of it. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when encountered through students’ own questions and inquiries. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when unexpectedly revealed through a book or a movie or some other creative source. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when it blooms out of lived experience. Sometimes that information is most meaningful when it intersects with a skill to be practiced or acquired. And sometimes that information is most meaningful when it comes from someone you like or trust or respect. In other words, there are a lot of ways we gather information, and there are a lot of ways we learn. But what matters most across all of these is that what is learned is meaningful and relevant and true. And Milwaukee’s civil rights history (the topic of my lecture), when told honestly and completely, is all of those things.

As I outlined the route of marchers on the night of August 28, 1967, I asked if anyone knew why Milwaukee was called the Selma of the North. “I’ve seen the movie Selma!” Cara said. “That’s when MLK marched across the bridge.” I pointed to the 16th Street Bridge on our Milwaukee map. “This is where the marches in Milwaukee started. This bridge. And they went on for 200 nights.”

Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches were a youth-led movement, organized by the NAACP Youth Council in response to lived experience with Milwaukee’s housing segregation. When I showed pictures of Youth Council members, Aaliyah noticed that they were probably the same age as her and her classmates. What would have been their peers marched nearly four miles from Milwaukee’s North Side to Koszciusko Park on the South Side. The marchers had chosen this route specifically because it was called in Milwaukee “the quickest way from Africa to Poland,” a crass joke about the deep racial segregation in Milwaukee’s housing. As we went over the history of housing segregation in Milwaukee—redlining and highway construction, restrictive covenants, and white violence—students talked over each other to say that Milwaukee was still segregated. We remembered that we, a class split pretty evenly between Black and Latinx students, had not spent any time in one another’s neighborhoods, a fact we were regularly reminded of on our field trips. I also reminded them of their nervousness the first time we went exploring around St. Joan, which Jade said was because they didn’t belong to the neighborhood. As I talked, they jumped in with connections that made it clear that this history was still the world they lived in.

The lecture covered a lot: the wealth and vitality of Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods before they were destroyed, the role of Father Groppi, how demographics have changed in the city, the federal Fair Housing Act, the 200 nights of marches organized by Black Lives Matter protestors this past year, the role youth play in current protest movements. We were learning history, and we were using history to make sense of the city we live in now. Yes, I was giving a lecture, but that lecture was proving to be a powerful way of encountering our city’s history together. And our collective meaning-making was changing how we understood Milwaukee in real-time.

On the first night of marching, the few hundred youth marchers were met halfway across the bridge by an angry white mob. That mob of thousands of white folks threw bottles at the marchers and carried signs saying “White Power;” they stood on cars and broke streetlights and wielded bats. That mob even scared the police, marchers later remembered, who begged Father Groppi to turn around and lead his youth back to their neighborhood. When I showed images of that mob, raging just outside the gorgeous Polish basilica we’d visited a few weeks earlier, Sheree raised her hand. “But my old social studies teacher told me that racism like that didn’t exist in Milwaukee. It was a Southern thing, not a Northern thing. Is that true?” The pictures of white crowds carrying swastikas and wearing KKK uniforms answered that question for her.

That afternoon, my students told me that they genuinely didn’t know that Milwaukee was an important city in the Civil Rights Movement. They told me that they genuinely didn’t know that the Civil Rights Movement happened in the North, too—angry mobs and retaliating police and all. They didn’t know that all around us was hallowed historical ground.

And that, I think, is what made that lecture so meaningful. It was the right method to introduce them to a slice of history that had been hidden from them, and it allowed us to make connections and ask questions together. I had information to share that I hoped would help them see their city in new ways. It’s not that they were empty receptacles waiting to be filled; it’s that I wanted to share what I know in the hopes that it would inspire them to ask more questions. I wanted them to meet their city anew, and they were grateful for the introduction.

What mattered most wasn’t how they encountered this history; what mattered most was that they were getting to encounter it all.

---

Dr. Gibson has given permission to have her reflections about this ongoing work with Dr. Doerr-Stevens and the students at St. Joan Antida shared from her blog The Present Tense through the Marquette Educator. Each week, we will share a post from Dr. Gibson about this ongoing journey. Please check back to read more about this exciting partnership and transformative learning process.

Remembering & Forgetting in Walker’s Point

Stand at the corner of 5th and National, and here’s what you see: An antique store, a dance studio, a purple-doored hamburger joint, and a row of Bubblr bikes for rent. The busy intersection is gritty, somewhere between industrial and cool, sort of gentrified but also still unpolished. The rumble of the interstate one block west is a reminder of the neighborhood’s centrality, as are the three rivers that border it.

This is Walker’s Point.

​Near this intersection on 5th Street is a hybrid hair salon/plant shop, Folia. Intricately carved wood pillars frame the windows, which are full of dripping monsteras and pathos. It’s the kind of shop where everything is hip: the elegant block lettering on the signage; the restored wood in deep auburn stain; the cellar doors locked tight with old-fashioned devices; the upcycled chandeliers; the cream city brick. It’s a spot that seems emblematic of the current vision for Walker’s Point, sitting at the crossroads of history, industry, and young urban money.

If you look next to the door, though, you’ll see a small medallion mounted on the brick: the designation of a Walker’s Point neighborhood landmark. No other information is given. Lucky for my students and me, though, we were walking the block with historian and native Milwaukeean Sergio González, and he filled in what the medallion left out. This building was the original home of the Our Lady of Guadalupe Chapel, the first mission established by Milwaukee’s Mexican community in 1926. And in this one building, with this one group of students and teachers on this one block of Milwaukee, we have a crystallized snapshot of how we remember and forget in our Milwaukee.

---

​When I told my Wednesday students that we were going on an expedition to Walker’s Point, I got a lot of blank stares. While two of the students were familiar with the neighborhood—specifically its Día de Muertos altars—the rest knew nothing. This surprised me. Half of my Wednesday group are Latinx, and Walker’s Point has the largest concentration of Spanish speakers in the state. Plus, Walker’s Point is Milwaukee’s “it” neighborhood right now; had they really not heard of Zócalo and the Selena mural and Purple Door Ice Cream?

Spoiler alert: They really hadn’t.

So when we walked into the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, the students had few expectations beyond wanting to make it to the food trucks before our bus left at 3pm. But so much instantly called out to us: Letterpressed posters in Spanish and English begging for better driving. Mosaic art declaring “Black Vidas Matter.” Spanish conversations in the background. Before we’d even gotten to the academic part of our visit, the girls were chatting with the mosaic artist, an alumna of their same Catholic school, as well as the gallery director, who used to work in the school’s admissions office. This place they didn’t know was just one step removed from spaces and places in Milwaukee that they considered home.
During the official “history” part of our visit, Dr. González told us the story of Milwaukee’s Mexican American community. He told us how Rafael Baez migrated to Milwaukee from Puebla in 1863; the first known Mexican immigrant in Milwaukee, Baez was an accomplished musician and a professor at Marquette University. The 1920s brought wider spread migration when the Pfister-Vogel Tannery imported labor from Mexico. Although the tannery was only concerned with a short-term labor supply, the Mexican American community that sprung up and stayed has since become an essential part of Milwaukee’s community fabric. And that community has been centered right here in Walker’s Point.

Yet so much of this fabric is being erased. Not completely—“Milwaukee’s too segregated for that,” locals remark—but still noticeably so. For example, a neighborhood landmark, the blockwide La Fuente restaurant, was recently demolished with little fanfare, its Selena mural crumbling to make way for a new condo development. A recent Washington Post article recommending Walker’s Point as a home base when visiting Milwaukee mentions none of this. Instead, the WaPo article vaguely says, “No one Milwaukee neighborhood gives a complete portrait of the city, but Walker’s Point comes closer than most. In addition to prestigious restaurants, this centrally located district is home to some of Milwaukee’s bustling sports bars, the liveliest gay clubs, and the tastiest tacos.” Amid the art galleries and mid-century furniture stores, glass pantries, and CBD shops, it can feel like Walker’s Point’s Mexican American foundations are being pushed aside to make space for the new Milwaukee. Folia and its silent history as the first Mexican American church in Milwaukee (the shop’s owners didn’t even know they were in a former chapel!) are emblematic of this erasure.

I think of this again a few days later when I hear Sergio on the radio, talking about the lack of National Historic Landmarks commemorating Milwaukee’s Latino community. “The way in which we recognize specific places as being historically relevant in many ways dictates what we think is important about who we are as a people. And the fact that Latinos don’t have any recognized place in the National Register speaks to that larger forgetting of a century-long history of our people in the state,” Sergio said. Even here in Walker’s Point, it can be easy to forget how important the Mexican American community has long been to Milwaukee.

Which was why we were here. When I first asked my Wednesday students what they wanted to explore about Milwaukee’s history, they rattled off the expected: The Pfister Hotel. The Pabst Mansion. The Milwaukee Public Museum. They also begged to head farther afield: the lakefront, the suburbs, maybe even Chicago. To them, exploring Milwaukee meant exploring a Milwaukee they didn’t consider their own. But here in Walker’s Point, we were reminded that, not only is all of Milwaukee our Milwaukee (case in point: Where did the Pfister fortune that funded the hotel come from? The labor of Mexican migrants right here in Walker’s Point), but all of Milwaukee is worth exploring. All around us is evidence of remembering and forgetting, and so much of what we forget is the history of communities that don’t build hotels, that don’t have the power to declare National Landmarks, that don’t have the wealth to resist demolition. Even more specifically, too much of the history we forget is the history of communities of color.

But I also wanted them to see that, even in the familiar parts of our city, there are layered histories just beneath the surface. For example, while the thriving Zócalo food truck part might seem at first glance like an emblem of gentrification, that surface-level understanding is complicated by the fact that the founder, Sergio’s cousin, has family roots in Walker’s Point. In fact, the González family (baby Sergio included) was once featured on the cover of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, on the steps of the Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Walker’s Point, for a special issue on Milwaukee’s Mexican American community. Entrepreneurial success is understood differently when it is of the community, not replacing the community.

Or take Xela, the director of the arts center where we began our neighborhood visit. She is a newly elected member of the Milwaukee Public Schools board of directors. As a Milwaukee transplant based in Walker’s Point, she straddles this history and carries it forward into the present-day politics of our city and its institutions. She embodies Walker’s Point: past, present, future.

---

​I am reminded of this the week after our Walker’s Point visit when my co-facilitator and I introduce the students to their next task. They are going to collect stories in their own neighborhoods, just like we did in Walker’s Point. Photos, selfies, soundscapes, and interviews, they are going to think about what remembering and forgetting look like in their immediate worlds. As we learn about oral history from Professor Rob Smith, we ask who they might want to interview in their own neighborhoods. Whose stories in their communities were worth collecting? Jamila quickly offers up her grandma, and then the room is otherwise silent until Aracely sucks her teeth and says to the ceiling, “Nobody. Nobody in my neighborhood is worth interviewing.” There is a pause, and then voices speak up: “What about a barber?” “Yeah, or a corner store owner?” “I’ve got a neighbor that has lived here forever.” “Do you think I could interview the kids that sit on the corner?” Even as our list of potential interviewees grows, Aracely’s dismissive “nobody” sits with me, as if there are no stories worth collecting in her world. And that becomes the ultimate forgetting. But we refuse to forget, and so instead we all prod her with ideas as if to remind her: Your Milwaukee matters, and there are stories here worth collecting. Your Milwaukee is worth remembering, too.

---

Dr. Gibson has given permission to have her reflections about this ongoing work with Dr. Doerr-Stevens and the students at St. Joan Antida shared from her blog The Present Tense through the Marquette Educator. Each week, we will share a post from Dr. Gibson about this ongoing journey. Please check back to read more about this exciting partnership and transformative learning process.

Interested in learning more about undergraduate or graduate programs in the College of Education? Visit us online today!

On Curiosity

By Dr. Melissa Gibson

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

Albert Einstein

What do you notice when you walk outside in the morning?

Me, I notice how the light is dappled differently through the east-facing trees in September than it is in July. I notice the smell of toasting bread from the corner bakery. I notice that some mornings the grass is heavy with dew. I notice the remnants of a car window smashed into the street. I notice an older woman rushing to the #60 bus and my neighbor languidly walking his dog with coffee in hand. Even in my own frantic race out of the house, I notice. And that noticing usually turns into wondering—sometimes on task (“What exactly is the dew point, again?” and “I wonder whose car got broken into?”), sometimes not (“Why is adult life just one big rush to get everywhere and still always end up late?”).

This is just the fabric of my mind’s life: noticing and wondering, wondering and noticing. In other words, I take for granted that I am curious and that curiosity drives my experience of the world.

---

Curiosity is a basic prerequisite for meaningful learning. We can, of course, memorize facts and practice skills without curiosity; we can get good grades and jump through academic hoops without curiosity. But meaningful learning, the kind that lights our souls on fire and can project us into states of flow, requires something more than external motivation. It requires curiosity.

It’s a stale lament—and often a deeply oppressive one—that students lack curiosity.  We teachers wonder what happened to turn our students from the curious little beings who asked so many “why” questions that we wanted to scream to the stony-faced, half-sleeping, resistant teens before us, but the answer is at least partly simple: School happened. The skill-and-drill of the standardized testing regime, the age-old banking of disembodied content, the grading of right and wrong answers, the sitting in desks with few opportunities to explore, the monotony of a teacher’s droning voice.

School happened.

What heartbreaking knowledge—both as a teacher who might perpetuate this mind-numbing system and as a human who has spent the majority of their life inside schools, fighting to hold onto a flourishing life of the mind. Layer in the exclusion and oppression that students of color, queer students, low-income students, neurodivergent students, and recently immigrated students face and one wonders how we don’t have a youth rebellion on our hands.

Except we do. It’s called disengagement.

There are 24 students in the weekly local history workshop that I am facilitating. 24 students who, for one reason or another, need to make up a high school social studies credit after disengaging. My charge for the thirteen weeks is to spark their curiosity about our city and the stories we tell about it. I have a whole host of instructional tools I’ll use—local history media, field experiences, oral history gathering, guest speakers, participatory mapping, food stories—but none of that means anything unless we cultivate curiosity.

---

​Here I am, on a bright Wednesday afternoon, our second together, checking students into their Covid seating arrangement before we head out on a neighborhood walk. Today’s objective is simply to notice the world around us. We are going to walk, cameras in hand, and observe the neighborhood. We are going to capture images of things that speak to us, whether because they are interesting or curious or funny or beautiful or for no reason we can articulate. We are going to notice and photograph, wonder and walk. And we’re going to call that history class.

Now, in the week prior and the week since, I have had to talk my trained-social-studies-teacher-self back from the ledge. What is this nonsense I’m doing? This isn’t social studies. What about the content and the standards and the democratic and discursive skills and…? Here I stop and remind myself: I am cultivating curiosity. Because before we can get to any of that, we have to be curious about the world we live in. We have to start noticing what this world is, and then start wondering: Why is it like this? How did it come to be? What else could it be like? Do I like it? Why or why not? What am I not seeing in the world around me? How does this world make me feel? What might those feelings be trying to tell me? If I want the “official” learning to be anything more than useless information (which they could access via Google anyways, so what would even be the point of that??), we need to be curious. We need to notice and wonder and, then, think and learn.

How do you accomplish that in two hours, once a week, with a group of reluctant social studies students? We started with a tree.

What is this? I asked the students while holding up a slice of tree trunk. What do the lines tell us? They of course knew: the rings tell us about the tree’s age. Yes, but when you’re walking down the street, what do you see? You might notice the tree is large and therefore probably old, but you don’t know how old; you don’t know when it grew slowly and when it grew quickly; you can’t see the scars of drought and flooding and fire. When we walk down the street, we see the bark of trees. We can stop there. Or, we can wonder: what stories does this tree have to tell us? What would I see if I could peel back this bark?

Of course, I’m not only talking about trees. And so I let Clint Smith help me out here. In his new book, How the Word Is Passed,  he explores how slavery is memorialized or forgotten at a variety of historical sites in North America and Senegal. In a recent NPR piece, he tells a bit of the story of Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the US. Angola is built on top of a former Louisiana plantation; today, incarcerated men—mostly Black—still work cotton fields under the rifles of overseers. That alone is a horrific layering. But in this interview, Smith talks about visiting the Angola gift shop (WTF, I know), where there are mugs for sale that say, “Angola. A gated community,” and where you can buy a twenty-foot poster of a white overseer watching out over a field of incarcerated Black men who are picking cotton. The image is in black-and-white, so you have to do a hard look to determine whether it is pre- or post-1863. And then you can go tour the barracks, take your picture on death row, and watch the men farming from your bus as you leave the Angola grounds. Smith asks in his book and in this interview, “How can such a place exist?”

My students are agape as they listen to the interview clip. I have, purposefully, chosen a horrific example of what we might see beneath the bark; it’s also an important example. What we take for granted as “just the way the world is” is often masking important perspective and history. How can we train ourselves to wonder how the world came to be this way—and then to care about the answer?

Next, we walk. Thirty minutes around East Town, a tony neighborhood near the lake and downtown, full of young professionals and college students. It’s the only neighborhood in Milwaukee served by the new, free Hop train. It is the neighborhood my students visit for school, but it is not their neighborhood. Their task is to document what they see in photos. They can do this free form, or they can participate in a photo scavenger hunt. What’s important is that they are noticing.

When we left for the walk, we were 150 minutes into knowing one another. They were polite but skeptical; they didn’t say much to me. When they came back thirty minutes later, they were new students. Their masks were off, so I could see their smiles. They were laughing as they ran towards school from all different directions. They traded phones to look at one another’s photos. They talked to me: Janel telling me about the church on the corner and how her grandma used to go there; Luz confessing she was scared to walk around the neighborhood without an adult. Mel and Shakira were on tiptoes watching the dance class practice percussion. Karen’s group showed us their video of Lake Michigan; Ashanti’s group laughed hysterically when we noticed they were all holding Panera cups; even Asia, who had not yet uttered a word in my presence, was talking with her classmates. The students were buzzing.

It was, of course, sunny. And it was, of course, warm. It was definitely Not School, and it was definitely novel to go strolling around the neighborhood with relative freedom. But when we returned to the classroom, the energy persisted. Without my prompting, the students whipped out their laptops and started organizing and sharing photos. Linda looked at me hungrily and said, “What’s next?” They dove into the storytelling task (“Tell a story about the neighborhood in three pictures”) and begged for more time than we had. When the bell rang, they were still working; we hurried through announcements and next steps while they gathered belongings and before they bolted.

Luz stopped at the door on her way out. “This was really fun,” she said, and then nodded goodbye.

---

​Someone looking at how we spent those 120 minutes could argue that we didn’t do anything. There was no content covered. There was no writing practice. There wasn’t a clear disciplinary connection. To an outsider, this might look like a high school version of playtime. And it was. Because in that playtime, something important happened: They noticed; they wondered. They laughed and explored. They were curious, and they left class hungry for more.

…

Dr. Gibson has given permission to have her reflections about this ongoing work with Dr. Doerr-Stevens and the students at St. Joan Antida shared from her blog The Present Tense through the Marquette Educator. Each week, we will share a post from Dr. Gibson about this ongoing journey. Please check back to read more about this exciting partnership and transformative learning process.

Bridging Latinx Studies and Education: Dr. Julissa Ventura Teaching NEW Latinx Education Course this Fall!

Dr. Julissa Ventura

This fall, Dr. Julissa Ventura, is looking forward to teaching a newly designed course that will examine the Latinx student experience through an educational context. The course will engage Marquette undergraduate and graduate students in understanding the challenges that Latinx students face in schools as well as how Latinx communities have resisted and transformed inequitable educational policies and practices.  

This is a course that Dr. Ventura has been wanting to teach for a long time based on her research with Latinx communities. She has found that while there is a growing demographic of the Latinx population across the United States, K-12 schools and institutions of higher education are still not attending to the needs and desires of Latinx students. In this course, Marquette students will examine social, cultural, and political constructions of Latinx youth, families, and communities in educational discourse, research, and policy. According to Dr. Ventura, “We will explore the challenges that Latinx communities face due to the historical, social and political context that shapes educational policy and practice, we will also identify strategies, tools, and efforts Latinx communities have taken up in transforming our educational system.”  

Dr. Ventura’s research and courses like this are particularly important as Marquette University works to become a Hispanic Serving Institution.  For Latinx students on campus, the course will be a way to contextualize and build upon their own experiences. As a community of learners, all students in the course will have the opportunity to engage with a variety of topics such as historical and current school segregation, immigration and transnationalism, students’ linguistic and cultural practices and more.  

One of the aspects of the course that Dr. Ventura is most excited about is the community-based project where Marquette students will work with Latinx youth in Milwaukee. Students will connect with high schoolers about once a week, either in person or virtually, to engage in research and policy proposals in a school or community-based organization. It is important that in a course that engages with Latinx educational issues, our learning is not limited to the Marquette classroom, but also goes out into our vibrant Milwaukee Latinx community.  

Artist: Favianna Rodriguez

Dr. Ventura hopes this course will draw in Marquette students who are interested in ethnic studies, education, and social justice. It aligns with the curricular steps that Marquette is taking to provide a more equity-oriented and diverse curriculum. This course is also not just for education majors/minors but would also be a great fit for students in the Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and all students who seek to learn more about Latinx communities and how to transform educational space for our Latinx students to thrive!  

EDUC 4600/5600 Latinx Education: Challenges and Possibilities will be offered on Mondays from 4:30 – 7:10 PM this fall semester and is open to undergraduate and graduate students. For more information on how to enroll in the course please contact Tina McNamara via email tina.mcnamara@marquette.edu or phone (414) 288-6981.

Teaching and Learning Virtually

Holly Hinton, Ed. ’22 and her mother, LouAnn Hinton.

Holly Hinton, Class of 2022, in the College of Education, is majoring in Secondary Education and Biology. This year, Holly has had the unique opportunity to observe a veteran science teacher, her mother, LouAnn, as she taught 7^th and 8^th grade science and religion to her students virtually at St. John of the Cross Parish School in Western Springs, IL.

We wanted to learn a little more about the experience that Holly had this year as she was virtually learning to teach while her mother was virtually teaching in the room next door. Here is what Holly had to say:

What was it like initially to find yourself at home with your mom teaching in the next room?

Having both of us home was definitely a big adjustment, but it was also a really unique experience to be home together while we were doing our work. We got to hang out during our breaks, so I got to see her a lot more. I was able to see how she interacts with and guides her class through discussions and learning, which was a great learning experience for me as a future teacher. I also got to help her create lab demonstration videos!

What did you learn from your mom about teaching?

One thing I learned was that teachers work SO hard for their students. My mom works late into the night grading papers, planning lessons, and going the extra mile to make sure her students have a great experience in her class. Watching how much she cares and puts into her teaching makes me appreciate my own teachers so much more.

How did you help one another with your teaching and learning?

It was fun to be home with my mom this semester because I got to share a lot about what I was learning in my education classes and she could explain how what I was learning related to her real-life experiences in her classroom. It was cool to hear some insight from someone who had been through it herself. I was able to help her, too! Going completely online meant that my mom had to use a lot of new technology she had never used before. I was able to guide her through that as well as help her create videos of labs for the class to view from home. 

Any specific good stories come to mind?

Not necessarily a “good” story, but we both ended up getting COVID-19 together during all of this! We were able to comfort and console each other through it, and quarantine together away from the rest of the family so it wasn’t so lonely. And, since we are both science teachers, we were interested in learning as much as we could about viruses, how our immune systems work, and how diseases like COVID-19 spread.

What’s one blessing you found in being at home teaching with your mom in the next room?

It allowed us to get closer, enjoy our new puppies together, and learn from each other!

Ms. Haugen’s 1st Period Class

Lily Haugen, Class of 2023, is majoring in Secondary Education and English, with a minor in Theater Arts. During the fall 2020 semester, Lily, was enrolled in EDUC 2001: Teaching Practice 1: Instructional Design and Teaching Models with Dr. Terry Burant. This class is one of the newly launched redesigned courses in Marquette’s recently redesigned teacher education program. As the name of the course implies, students practiced designing and teaching lessons using the various teaching models they learned in class.

Lily quickly realized that it helped her to have actual “students” to teach in these practice sessions and she reached out to her friend bubble, the people she spent time with during fall semester. She asked if they were free on a Sunday evening and would they be willing to be her students in a 20-minute lesson about how to annotate a novel. They agreed!

Ms. Haugen with “students” from her 1st Period Class

Lily shared that after filming the lesson, “they told me that they had so much fun participating and playing along” and they even admitted to having learned something from the lesson and would be using some annotation tips the next time they had a reading for class.

Lily relied on the same group of friends when she used the “tea party method” to introduce characters from a novel to students. During filming, her friends got into and stayed in character, referring to Lily as “Ms. Haugen” and they eventually changed their group chat to “Ms. Haugen’s 1^st Period,” a name they still use to describe their group.

Dr. Burant asked Lily to reflect on what she learned from teaching her peers and friends instead of teaching in a field placement. Lily explained:

As a freshman, my first field placement, was in a kindergarten classroom. Even though I was only there once a week, I developed a strong bond with the students. In a similar way, even though I was teaching my friends who were pretending to be my students, I felt us grow closer and strengthen our bond through teaching.

The thing that stuck with me the most was how all my friends got to see me doing what I am passionate about. They saw how important teaching is to me and I could feel their respect and admiration for me and the work I was doing. My friends come from a variety of academic backgrounds with our common thread being theatre, so it was really satisfying to let them into the world of teaching and show them what I do. Now not only do they now understand how important teaching is to me, but they also care more about teaching and see how useful it is in any field. We had a tight knit bond that only got stronger after doing these lessons.”

Here are few things that Ms. Haugen’s “students” had to say about the experience:

“Being a different kind of teacher, I learned how to adapt to different situations being thrown at you. I also learned the importance of listening and cooperation from both parties. It is a very important skill I believe to be able to talk AND listen. Students can be pretty smart” -Will

“I learned the importance of adaptability while teaching” -Giorgia

“I learned what a simile was” -Will

“I learned all the different styles teaching can take form in, and every activity was unique and still reinforced concepts that I learned previously (even if I did forget about them) in a new way to keep our group engaged.”- Sam

“I learned how teachers find fun ways to educate but still keep their students engaged” -Piper

“Since I am going into speech pathology, I definitely appreciated the different skills you used to keep us engaged and how you modeled what you wanted us to be doing. I will carry that into my own work!” –Giorgia

Advocating for School Counselors

This past fall, students enrolled in Noreen Siddiqui’s EDUC 4000 course were asked to take on a semester-long research project exploring a topic related to education and then performing an act of advocacy to inform others. Student projects could range from letters to websites to PSA to podcasts, such as Roy Bowler’s focusing on school counseling.

My name is Roy Bowler. I am a senior from New York City, majoring in secondary education and journalism.

This was an assignment that we completed throughout the course of the semester. I saw that we had to advocate for something in American education. I knew about a lot of the some of the issues in American education including those of inequality, but I wanted to do something that I had not heard about before. So, I did some research and saw that there was a huge lack and need for school counselors. The ratio recommended by America School Counselor Association of 250 students to 1 counselor was not even close to being met in most of America’s schools. Even schools that I had attended did not meet the ratio, and these were all great schools. It was also an issue I had never even heard about, so I thought it would be a great topic to explore. 

Throughout the semester we compiled research and data. I really liked how we did the project step by step. It forced you not to procrastinate, and you received feedback after each step that you could apply to the final submission. As we came to the final step of the project, I saw that we had to take all the individual steps and compile the information into a project where we actually advocated for our issue of choice. Being a journalism major as well, and having taken a podcasting class, I figured a great way to advocate would be to make a podcast. I reached out to some people and received tremendous help from Dr. Karisse Callender, who organized my interviews with Dr. Alexandra Kriofske Mainella and grad students Max Moderski and Kennidy Summers. They did a great job explaining the issues to me from an actual counselor’s point of view. I also felt it would be best to let them advocate. They did a great job on that, too. 

My favorite part was definitely interviewing. It helped that the subjects were so knowledgeable and passionate about the need for more school counselors. I appreciated their insight and their ability to advocate. The most difficult part was probably putting the podcast together and deciding what fit where. I had to cut some stuff because if I did not the podcast would have been too long. Though, the fact that we completed steps of this project throughout the course of the semester alleviated a lot of the stress that would come with a huge project like this. 

I really enjoyed having such a practical assignment. While we did the normal class stuff, like readings and discussions, we also did our own research throughout the semester and became experts on a topic that we can help advocate for during our times as educators. I appreciated the freedom that we were given by being able to pick any topic we’d like and advocate for it in any way we’d like. I know some of my classmates created social media pages and websites where they advocated for issues like the need for culturally and linguistically diverse advocates in special education and the decreasing the number of standardized tests students are required to take. 

I think as a teacher, I will try to advocate for more school counselors. It really made me interested in the profession. As I progress my own education, I may even try to take some counseling courses. If I am placed in a school that has a shortage of school counselors, I could try to take on the role with my students as best as I can. 

Leading by Example – A True Embodiment of Being the Difference

By Kathryn Rochford

screenshot of MUBB’s tweet from Jan. 5, 2021. https://twitter.com/MarquetteMBB/status/1346631266851020800

Wednesday, January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in the history books. We as a country witnessed a ghastly display of chaos, a lack of proper leadership, and unnecessary use of violence to attempt to overturn a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. There was headline after headline discussing the events, and it seemed it was all any news source could talk about.

However, buried underneath the flood of articles written about events in Washington, D.C., there was one headline that caught my eye in a powerful way. It was a description of the Marquette men’s basketball team and their choice to wear Black Lives Matter shirts and black uniforms on the night of the 5^th to stand in solidarity with Jacob Blake, the man shot in Kenosha last August. They wanted to stand against the announcement that the officer who shot Blake would face no charges regarding the shooting and to remind their fans that “…just because racial and social injustice hasn’t received as much attention recently, doesn’t mean the need to fight against it has gone away.”

In reading this article and in the tweet that the team put out, I had tears in my eyes. We as a university pride ourselves on advocating for social justice issues and for standing up for what is right. In a day where so much went wrong, I held so much immense respect for the team for leading the way and showcasing the very ideal of Marquette which is to “Be the Difference.” Where a lack of proper leadership was shown yesterday, I was able to reflect on how grateful I am that I attend a university that prides itself on instructing its students to care for others, to advocate for social justice issues, and more importantly to do what we can as individuals to “Be the Difference.”

Our basketball team took a stand Tuesday night and helped us to refocus on the need to educate and advocate for social justice issues. The past few months have taught us that there is always a need to improve and to do better for each person around us. In continuing our education, both formally and informally, I can only begin to imagine the positive impact that this generation of Marquette graduates will have on the world. Our Marquette education will provide us the strength to speak up when injustice is evident, to creatively find solutions to problems at hand, and most importantly to recognize the need to care for the whole person, using the Jesuit concept of cura personalis.

In times like this, I can still feel the power and solidarity I felt when I was in a packed Fiserv Forum cheering on our basketball team, all the while chanting with my classmates “We are Marquette.” I am proud to be a Marquette student, and I can’t wait for us all to be together again in that arena, cheering on a team who was ready to show the world an example of true leadership and advocacy. We are stronger together, and most importantly, we are Marquette.

What Are You Grateful For? Lucy Corrigan

We asked our students what they are thankful for and what they are excited about as we look ahead to a new year. Read on to hear from Lucy, a junior in the college.

My name is Lucy Corrigan, and I am a current junior in the College of Education from St. Louis studying elementary education and spanish!

More than ever, I am thankful for my professors in the College of Education this year. They are the most supportive educators I have ever met. I continuously reflect on how grateful I am to have such dedicated, passionate, and caring professors. I feel so lucky to be in the College of Education at Marquette.

My wish for the 2021 is that we can all grow together and become more empathetic with everything going on.

This fall, we have been spending time getting to know our students! You can get to know more of our students and our faculty/ staff on previous posts.

Launching the Marquette Teachers Teach Series: A source for sharing teaching materials online

By: Terry Burant, Ph.D.

Here we are in November of 2020 and the pandemic that is gripping our city, our nation, and our world is only getting worse, reminding us that we need to continue to remain at a distance from one another for the foreseeable future. I don’t know about you, but as an educator, staying away from my students and my colleagues wasn’t what I had in mind when I chose this profession years ago! Not being in a classroom; not visiting Marquette students in schools; not hearing the voices of our student teachers as they crowd into SC 112 for their weekly seminar, sharing their stories of their experiences; and not having my office feel like a busy train station with students and colleagues coming in and out has made this one of the strangest semesters ever.

As the Director of Teacher Education, one of the hardest things for me to accept was realizing that our field experiences would not occur in their typical fashion this year. After a long summer of planning for contingencies, through ingenuity, creativity, and collaboration, our faculty developed a variety of alternatives for field experiences including viewing videos of teaching; participating in supervised virtual tutoring and service learning; engaging in simulations; developing curriculum; and practicing teaching methods and models and filming them and critiquing their videos with peers. As a result, many of our students have created excellent instructional materials that deserve to be shared and used!

As we near the end of the semester, I’d like to invite our students, and our alumni teachers to contribute work to a new section on our College of Education website called “Marquette Teachers Teach Series.” This site features instructional videos and materials developed by students in our classes and made available for parents, tutors, and teachers to use as they teach from home, teach virtually, or teach back in classrooms.

We are excited to not only showcase curriculum materials from our students and alumni, but to also stand beside teachers and parents who are working to provide the best education possible for their own students. These instructional materials will be available to the community at large, whether that’s here in Milwaukee or anyone who accesses our website.

We know that our students miss being in the field, and we also know that the K-12 students and teachers in Milwaukee miss them. It is our hope that through this new series, we can continue to reach out to our community and make a difference in this challenging time.

Please take a moment to visit our site where you will find directions for uploading your materials for consideration! Thank you!